Elon Musk is a Hero too a lot of us.
And a well deserved one I heartily admit.
I pasted this from the top
""The company designed and built in-house the Merlin engines that power its Falcon 9 rocket. It also developed key components like the guidance and rendezvous technologies needed to reach the station.""
This is all there is since Armadillo and Masten and a few others have remained small,,Musk has the ball$$ to Go for It.
Every Single time those Merlin-9's start screaming,,,
,The above phrase starts ""The company"".
Everything proofed after this. Company is proven when the candle is lit.Give them the credit they deserve!!!
Go SpaceX!!!!!
Go-Cowboys!!!!!
Happy Thanksgiving to all the World!!!!!!
a joe in Texas

John Pike holds aerospace companies to a very high standard because manned spaceflight remains a very dangerous business. In the Apollo days, engines were tested well beyond their operational limits so engineers had a better understanding of how to design safety into a vehicle. This involved the blowing up of a lot of rockets. Obviously, things have changed since the 1960s, and SpaceX has so far done an excellent job with incremental advances. As stated, the real test comes when humans are strapped into the Dragon spacecraft. That won't happen until NASA managers are satisfied that the SpaceX spacecraft and rocket are "man-rated."

Agreed. I'm puzzled by Pike's reference to "random success". Success is success, period. It's unfortunate that there's an entrenched group that refuses to believe that private enterprise has a role to play in space exploration and is hoping to see SpaceX fail to prove themselves right.

Linux torvalds once said - "Talk is cheap, show me the code". I think this applies to critics of Elon Musk in general and SpaceX in particular. Everyone acknowledges that getting rockets right is hard. Hell SpaceX will have a spectacular blow out sooner or later {I hope it doesn't}. But it should not be used to bury them and kill the dream of reusable rockets and mars.

In conjunction with unveiling of EE Times’ Silicon 60 list, journalist & Silicon 60 researcher Peter Clarke hosts a conversation on startups in the electronics industry. One of Silicon Valley's great contributions to the world has been the demonstration of how the application of entrepreneurship and venture capital to electronics and semiconductor hardware can create wealth with developments in semiconductors, displays, design automation, MEMS and across the breadth of hardware developments. But in recent years concerns have been raised that traditional venture capital has turned its back on hardware-related startups in favor of software and Internet applications and services. Panelists from incubators join Peter Clarke in debate.